I haven't been over to Reddit in a while. Is this really what it's like now?
I remember when I left, /r/programming read pretty much like HN does now, with an occasional mean comment or joke thread left alive to get in the way. The linked thread, though, has no actual discussion. It's just a bunch of people making silly jokes. Sad to see it go that way.
This wasn't posted in /r/programming, though; it's /r/reddit.com, a general purpose subreddit that new users are subscribed to by default, and that has double the subscribers compared to proggit. I imagine lots of new users unsubscribe from proggit but not from /r/reddit.com; anecdotally speaking, reddit's becoming very popular among my non-programmer but internet-familiar friends who like pictures of cats and rage comics.
That isn't to say to that proggit isn't pretty different to HN; going on there now (having not visited it in a while) only a handful of links show as having been visited due to my seeing them on HN. The content there is different and the level of discourse is acceptable, so I like it.
Proggit is almost exactly like news.yc linkwise and pretty much always has been since HN branched off. The comments are a little more relaxed though. There's people who hunt for new popular links on each which haven't reached the other and act something like arbitrage systems and quickly post it up on the lacking board. It's fun to watch, someone should make a realtime diff site between the two, something like that ervqhgg thing from awhile ago.
Proggit's in the top 10, so I'm pretty sure it's opt-out, unless they treat it like r/atheism and display it in r/all but not on the default frontpage.
Usually when I tell people about reddit, I tell them to skip the front page and go straight to the reddits page and find topics that interest them.
The front page has too many cat pictures and crap for my taste these days. Hopefully they eventually have the time to implement one of the solutions I suggested to alleviate the problem.
I've actually been showing up regularly at NYC's reddit events, and made quite a few friends in the community, but I don't really load up Reddit anymore - too much junk.
Some people enjoy frivolous chat and punnery. I particularly enjoyed the parody of Pirates of Penzance, a verse of which I sang out loud to the amusement of my coworkers. I don't understand this insistence on comparing websites to each other as if one were better than the other - I am a happy user of both HN and Reddit, they both serve separate purposes to me.
Interestingly, although on Hacker News the comparison is typically drawn with Reddit, on Reddit it's generally 4chan that serves that purpose. What site do 4chan users look down on?
All of them. With the caveat that when most people refer to 4chan they're referring to /b/, and that that isn't accurate, there really aren't many sites that /b/tards like. They tend to believe (rightly, imho) that every site takes itself too seriously and every community has an unwarranted sense of self-importance. That was generally the motivation behind most of the raids they did. At least, it used to be. It's summer right now so average quality is expected to be low, but a perusal of /b/ really does leave the impression that there aren't many original /b/tards left.
The sites /b/tards hate most:
-reddit (although there's a huge overlap in users, many /b/tards see it as a "sanitized" /b/ where funny things are reposted without anyone doing the work of making them in the first place)
-ebaumsworld (back in the day)
-knowyourmeme/icanhazcheezburger/all the other sites capitalizing off /b/'s memes
-facebook/myspace/deviantart/twitter/every other site whose primary use case seems to be people stroking their ego
Reddit has adopted its own culture and hive-mind—the bigger Subreddits are less focused on intellectual discussion and more on having fun (for better or for worse), but they still have a penchant for interesting articles.
(There was an image that hit Reddit's front page a few months ago that illustrated how the first level of comments were intellectual amd all subsequent were merely "herp-derpery"—have a look for your self.)
/r/truereddit is pretty thin on discussion, but usually good for an interesting read.
Edit: Also, having now read some of the thread under discussion, the top-level tree is garbage, but the subthreads after that are mostly pretty thoughtful.
The link was not to /r/programming it was to /r/reddit.com. /r/programming has it's own problems, but these comments are definitely not representative of that subreddit.
I remember when I left, /r/programming read pretty much like HN does now, with an occasional mean comment or joke thread left alive to get in the way. The linked thread, though, has no actual discussion. It's just a bunch of people making silly jokes. Sad to see it go that way.